CIOs lead on employee experience in a distributed workforce

With the roll­out of vac­cines and eas­ing coro­n­avirus-relat­ed restric­tions world­wide, com­pa­ny lead­er­ship teams are now look­ing to the future. Chief infor­ma­tion offi­cers (CIOs) are work­ing to reset strat­e­gy and rebuild organ­i­sa­tion­al resilience for a post-pan­dem­ic age.

For over a year, legions of employ­ees world­wide have been work­ing from home on a full-time basis, thanks in large part to the hero­ic efforts of IT teams to equip them with the tools, data and sup­port need­ed to stay pro­duc­tive.

A study by Cardiff and Southamp­ton uni­ver­si­ties sug­gests home work­ing in the future is like­ly to boost rather than reduce pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. The broad­ly pos­i­tive results of the world’s largest-ever exper­i­ment in remote work­ing raise inter­est­ing ques­tions about what the future work­place will look like, but it’s evi­dent that enabling remote work­ing will be an ongo­ing focus for the CIO and their team.

The need for com­pa­nies to accel­er­ate their response to mar­ket changes is a top busi­ness pri­or­i­ty, accord­ing to 1,000 glob­al IT lead­ers sur­veyed by For­rester Con­sult­ing for a study com­mis­sioned by Elas­tic. Accel­er­at­ing their shift to dig­i­tal busi­ness and improv­ing cus­tomer and employ­ee expe­ri­ence was also in the top five pri­or­i­ties.

More than half the IT lead­ers sur­veyed said enabling employ­ees to work flex­i­bly and remote­ly will improve the adap­tive­ness of the busi­ness. To become more adap­tive, 63 per cent said they are evolv­ing their data archi­tec­tures to reduce data silos and democ­ra­tise employ­ee access to data. And 60 per cent are active­ly invest­ing in employ­ee expe­ri­ence to improve the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and per­for­mance of a dis­trib­uted work­force.

“Build­ing a resilient organ­i­sa­tion that can adapt flex­i­bly and piv­ot quick­ly is all about peo­ple,” says Kim Huff­man, vice pres­i­dent of glob­al IT at Elas­tic, whose solu­tions for enter­prise search, observ­abil­i­ty and secu­ri­ty are built on a sin­gle tech­nol­o­gy stack to enable users to instant­ly find action­able insights from any type of data in real time and at scale.

“Work­forces became dis­trib­uted almost overnight, which changed the needs of employ­ees and put a lot of pres­sure on CIOs to ensure employ­ees could con­tin­ue to col­lab­o­rate, con­nect and engage. Many CIOs still had on-premis­es sys­tems and dat­a­cen­tres, so it rapid­ly accel­er­at­ed the move to cloud infra­struc­ture and plat­forms.”

CIOs also had to change their secu­ri­ty pos­ture. Mil­lions of peo­ple who worked in offices were now remote, so CIOs had to change how they man­age their fleet and pro­tect their data. A lot of this ties into the employ­ee expe­ri­ence and their need to have unfet­tered access to com­pa­ny sys­tems and infor­ma­tion, regard­less of where they decide to work, enabling them to play a sat­is­fy­ing, pro­duc­tive role as part of a resilient dis­trib­uted work­force. Pro­vid­ing all this in a secure, pro­duc­tive and effec­tive man­ner has been very impor­tant for CIOs.

It’s not just at the CIO lev­el either, but an entire mind­set shift. “I call it the adap­tive enter­prise,” says Huff­man, “which means gear­ing up our organ­i­sa­tions and the peo­ple with­in them to be as effec­tive and pro­duc­tive as pos­si­ble. The fastest way to piv­ot to busi­ness and mar­ket changes is for IT lead­ers to make sure employ­ee expe­ri­ence is at the core of the IT strat­e­gy and that means giv­ing them the appro­pri­ate data and tech­nol­o­gy tools to work pro­duc­tive­ly.”

With a grow­ing num­ber of organ­i­sa­tions keen to be more agile and flex­i­ble, Elas­tic has been work­ing close­ly with cus­tomers to sup­port them through the jour­ney of adapt­ing their employ­ee expe­ri­ences to remote, dis­trib­uted work­ing.

The company’s solu­tions pro­vide CIOs with a set of easy-to-use, pow­er­ful appli­ca­tions to give their employ­ees a con­sumer-like search expe­ri­ence to help man­age, secure and mon­i­tor infra­struc­ture and make data and doc­u­ments find­able.

The Elas­tic Work­place Search prod­uct, in par­tic­u­lar, is a one-stop shop solu­tion for the vir­tu­al work­place, boost­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by enabling users to uni­fy all their con­tent plat­forms, includ­ing Google Dri­ve, Con­flu­ence, Slack and Sales­force, into one per­son­alised search expe­ri­ence. And, in response to the grow­ing cyberthreats faced by organ­i­sa­tions dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Elas­tic took deci­sive action to inte­grate its end-point pro­tec­tion and secu­ri­ty fea­tures into its free Basic tier.

“Elas­tic is focused on every­thing relat­ed to search­ing data,” says Huff­man. “Search is foun­da­tion­al to a wide vari­ety of expe­ri­ences, includ­ing employ­ee col­lab­o­ra­tion, which is what makes Work­place Search so valu­able.

“Organ­i­sa­tions have an abun­dance of con­tent sources and appli­ca­tions, and look­ing for infor­ma­tion and con­tent can be like find­ing a nee­dle in a haystack at times. Work­place Search is an effort­less, low-cost way to boost employ­ees’ pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and expe­ri­ence by uni­fy­ing all the con­tent plat­forms they use, mak­ing access to data and infor­ma­tion as fast as pos­si­ble. We have released fea­tures in our prod­ucts that enable organ­i­sa­tions to do more at a low­er cost, which our research shows many CIOs are hav­ing to man­age.”

Hav­ing spent the bet­ter part of a year react­ing to mar­ket changes, CIOs will soon resume a more proac­tive pos­ture as they take a dri­ving seat in reimag­in­ing employ­ee expe­ri­ence for the hybrid ways of work­ing that will emerge post-pan­dem­ic. To do that effec­tive­ly, CIOs should lean into the rela­tion­ships they’ve built with oth­er lead­er­ship team mem­bers, such as heads of human resources. Tru­ly mas­ter­ing employ­ee expe­ri­ence in a hybrid world will depend on hav­ing shared account­abil­i­ty across the exec­u­tive team.

“CIOs’ posi­tion has been ele­vat­ed; we have a seat at the table and are unique­ly posi­tioned now to work with the busi­ness and dri­ve the change required to embrace the new world of work,” Huff­man con­cludes. “We are going to start hear­ing less about com­plex dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions and more about dig­i­tal busi­ness mod­els where automa­tion and data-dri­ven strate­gies are employed to dri­ve rapid time-to-val­ue and increased agili­ty to the busi­ness.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it elastic.co

Pro­mot­ed by Elas­tic